That is a pretty big if.
We have very little information, and an awful lot over overexcited inferences being drawn from it.

The quotes from the foreman and the juror largely corroborate each other. The subsequent 15 minute interview with the foreman, which you can watch for yourself, clarifies some of the points but reinforces others that are raising eyebrows.

Watch the interview with foreman. He's asked specifically about prior art from about 13 minutes in, and responds with comments about how it was clear that Samsung infringed the design patents. I can find no reference that shows that after skipping coming to a conclusion on the prior art evidence on day 1 of deliberations they went back to consider it properly later on.

Watch the interview with foreman. He's asked specifically about prior art from about 13 minutes in, and responds with comments about how it was clear that Samsung infringed the design patents. I can find no reference that shows that after skipping coming to a conclusion on the prior art evidence on day 1 of deliberations they went back to consider it properly later on.

Graham

Here's the quote I'm looking at (from the interview):

Quote:

Emily Chang: You know it's all obviously extremely technical. there has been a lot of talk since this verdict has come down. How did you guys make this verdict so quickly. There were more than a hundred pages of jury instructions. There are even reports that you didn't read all of those instructions.

Vel Hogan: Oh. We read. First off, before closing arguments was given, the judge read to us the final instructions, instruction by instruction. Then she allowed the closing arguments, then she dismissed us. And so we had those closing argue..., those ah, instructions and we had them open there and then we took patent by patent and got hung upon the first one but the day was almost over by then and so I said to the jury, "We're not going to allow ourselves to get hung up. We're going to, if we find a debate like this, we'll move on. We'll do the simplest things first.” So then when I came back the next day...

Groklaw is *not* a less biased source at all. They are a FOSS advocacy site, which is fine, but their trial coverage reflects that bias, and has been absolutely terrible.

Their coverage of the Oracle/Google trail was spot on imo and all their doubts about the case were eventually shown to be accurate, which is more than can be said about the way mainstream media reported on the trail.

One thing groklaw do, is they often provide links to the court transcripts and other sources so we can always judge the material for ourselves and decide if we share their opinion/analysis or not.

There's bound to be some bias on every site, but so far I've found groklaw to be much more balanced than most. Not that I always agree with their conclusions.

IOW, they thought that Apple's damages were too high, which is why they only awarded 1/3 of those damages, much closer to what Samsung recommended. It's clear that they were not trying to punish Samsung.

(Coverage of these issues has been pretty bad, with most blogs just repeating headlines from other blogs, without looking at the actual sources).

Damages are supposed to compensate Apple for what they'd have earned had Samsung licensed the patents in question aren't they? If that's the case, then "high enough to be painful" shouldn't come into it. That imo sounds more like a punishment than damages. Also saying "slap on the wrist" suggests they saw the damages as a punishment and not simply payment that was due.

That's imho though, maybe I'm reading too much into what was said and I've no idea if any of what is been said could cause the judge to retry the case or if it's just extra ammo for Samsung to use in an appeal.

Vel Hogan: It was about a particular, ah, patent, ah, the '460 patent, and whether or not the prior art really did invalidate that pattern, that patent and so with that moment I had, I realized that the software on the Apple side could not be placed into the processor on the prior art and vice versa.

Emphasis mine.

It sounds like they went back to the prior art they'd got hung up on after his "aha" moment. However, it sounds like they then discounted it as been prior art based on his interpretation of what counts as valid prior art, which appears to be a flawed interpretation to me.

I was always under the impression that anything that has been publicly released/documented can count as prior art, it doesn't actually have to do anything or be functional, just text/graphics could count for example.

If the jury have incorrectly discounted prior art based on flawed advice from the foreman, how would that impact the validity of their ruling? Could the judge overturn the verdict or ask for a retrial? Or is it just more evidence to present at an appeal? I'm not really familiar with the US legal system.

I am amazed that the jury are allowed to talk about their deliberations, and are not bound to secrecy. Is this normal in the US?

Yes.

The judge can give the jury whatever advice on this he or she wants to give, and the jurors can do what they want with it. Googling this a bit, it sounds like US judges are more likely to tell the jury that they don't have to talk with the press than to out and out advise them against it.

One thing the jury must have known: Apple is a local firm, and Samsung is foreign. There should be some provision to have an international tribunal.

1.The jury didn't skip the instructions; the instructions were read to the jury in open court. The quote that Groklaw was flogging to support this idea (since they didn't actually follow the trial) came from when the jury went back in to fix the two discrepancies in the verdict form. This is crystal clear in the Verge's coverage; Groklaw took it out of context.

2. The jury didn't ignore the prior art evidence that was presented.

3. The idea that they went for punishing fees is another statement taken out of context. Here's the actual quote from the juror:

IOW, they thought that Apple's damages were too high, which is why they only awarded 1/3 of those damages, much closer to what Samsung recommended. It's clear that they were not trying to punish Samsung.

(Coverage of these issues has been pretty bad, with most blogs just repeating headlines from other blogs, without looking at the actual sources).

I should also point out that juror statements about deliberations are not grounds for appeal unless they relate to bribery or someone outside the jury trying to influence them.

"We wanted to make sure it was sufficiently high to be painful".

That there indicates with no doubt that they did not look for "reasonable royalty fees", but went for a punishing figure. That can be appealed by Samsung.

But he doesn't go on to say that they went back to reviewing prior art, particularly with regard to the design patent. His comment about coming back the next day was in reference to his 'aha' moment regarding Apple's code not running on prior art processors.

And that in itself is flawed, as if Apple is exonerated on the grounds that their code couldn't run on prior art devices, then surely Samsung should also be exonerated since their code couldn't run on iOS?

The average smartphone may arguably infringe as many as 250,000 patents, not to mention myriad copyrights and other design-related intellectual property. (Companies don't sift through every patent coming out of Washington before engineering and releasing a product; they create devices and battle claims as necessary.)

If you were to divide the average retail price of a smartphone — about $400 — by those 250,000 potentially applicable patents, you'd find that each one would account for just $0.0016 of the phone's value. And, in reality, even that's too much, once you factor in the costs of raw materials, labor, transportation and marketing, which also contribute to a phone's value.

Yet for infringing just a handful of Apple's patents, Samsung faces a minimum payment of $48 per phone, a shocking 30,000 times the average per patent value. Put another way, if the owners of all the 250,000 inventions that might be present in Samsung smartphones were awarded damages at the same level as Apple, Samsung would have to charge a ludicrous $2 million per phone just to break even.